Dying Fall

CHAPTER 1
    The phone is ringing when Ruth opens the front door. She pauses on the threshold, wondering whether she should just let it ring. Her friends all have her mobile number. The landline can only mean her mother or someone trying to sell her double glazing, and even though the windows of her cottage rattle in the wind she likes it that way, thank you very much. Her mother will only be ringing to torment her (‘I saw Janice’s daughter the other day, she’s a GP, ever so slim and attractive, and she’s got three children and they all play the violin. How’s the diet going?’). She decides to ignore it but Kate, her eighteen-month-old daughter, runs past her yelling ‘Ring! Ring!’ Kate picks up the phone and says clearly, ‘Piss.’ Cursing Cathbad, Kate’s Druid godfather, who has taught her the all-purpose salutation, ‘Peace’, Ruth snatches the phone away.
    ‘Hello?’
    ‘Ruth?’ It’s a woman and she’s laughing. ‘Did someone just say “piss”?’
    ‘That was Kate.’ Ruth is rifling through her mental list of acquaintances. Who can this be? Someone from the university? A chatty window saleswoman? But she sounds familiar …
    ‘Ruth,’ says the voice, ‘it’s Caz. Carol.’
    Carol. One of Ruth’s best friends from her university days. A fellow archaeology student, ex-flatmate, loyal drinking companion and repository of secrets. With a rush of guilt, Ruth realises that when she transferred her contacts onto her new phone last year she must have forgotten Caz. They haven’t spoken for almost three years.
    ‘I tried you on your mobile,’ Caz is saying, ‘but there was no answer.’
    As Ruth’s old mobile is currently reposing at the bottom of the sea, or washed up like flotsam on some North Norfolk beach, this is hardly surprising.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ says Ruth. ‘I’ve got a new one. I’ve been a bit crap about updating it.’
    ‘Don’t worry about it,’ says Caz. ‘It’s great to hear your voice.’
    ‘Great to hear you too.’ Ruth feels a rush of affection for Caz, cool spiky-haired Caz, expert exponent of drinking games, fan of explosive cocktails and dry-stone walls, anarchist and fearless beret-wearer. She’s an accountant now.
    ‘I’m really sorry, Ruth,’ Caz is saying, and all the laughter has gone from her voice. ‘But I’m ringing with bad news.’
    ‘Oh God.’ Again Ruth rifles through her list of friends. Is anyone dead, sick? She has just reached the age whenher friends start to seem mortal. She watches as Kate staggers into the room carrying Ruth’s cat, Flint. ‘Ahh! My Flinty.’
    ‘Put him down, Kate.’ Flint is giving her martyred looks over Kate’s shoulder.
    ‘What?’ says Caz.
    ‘Sorry. Just talking to Kate.’
    ‘Oh, I forgot you had a child. How old is she now?’
    ‘Nearly two.’ She feels stupid saying eighteen months and thinks that Caz, who has three children of her own, doesn’t sound particularly interested.
    ‘Cute,’ says Caz briefly. ‘The news. It’s Dan. Dan Golding.’
    ‘Dan? Dan the Man?’
    Dan Golding. Dan the man. The coolest archaeologist ever. The Indiana Jones of UCL. Ruth hasn’t heard from him for years but she has always imagined that he’s doing impossibly exciting things, finding the Lost Ark of the Covenant, starring in a Hollywood film, marrying Angelina Jolie.
    ‘What’s happened to him?’ she asks.
    ‘He’s dead,’ says Caz. ‘I read it in the paper. He was working at Pendle University and he died in a fire.’
    ‘Jesus.’ In all her imaginings, Ruth never thought of anything like this. Dan Golding the victim of something as simple and devastating as a fire. And Pendle University? It’s one of the new ones, like North Norfolk, the university where Ruth works. Nothing wrong with that, just that she’d always imagined Dan working at Cambridge or Harvard. Or diving for pearls off some South Sea Island.
    ‘I didn’t know he was working at Pendle,’ she says stupidly.
    ‘Nor did I. It’s just round the corner from me.’ Of course, Caz lives up north.
    ‘It was awful,’ Caz is saying, ‘I just read it in the local paper. Archaeologist Daniel Golding found dead in his Fleetwood cottage. I didn’t even twig at first because I’ve never thought of him as Daniel.’
    ‘How did the … what happened?’
    ‘The article just said that he’d died in a house fire. The place was completely gutted apparently. They think it was caused by faulty electric wiring.’
    Faulty electric